


suddenly there’s sunlight all around me

by mutterandmumble



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Feelings Realization, First Kiss, Introspection, M/M, Mild Language, Oblivious Kageyama Tobio, Pre-Relationship, Third Year Hinata Shouyou and Kageyama Tobio, unbetaed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-14
Updated: 2020-07-14
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:22:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25255345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mutterandmumble/pseuds/mutterandmumble
Summary: in their third year, they kiss
Relationships: Hinata Shouyou/Kageyama Tobio
Comments: 20
Kudos: 143
Collections: Kagehina





	suddenly there’s sunlight all around me

**Author's Note:**

> Title from all I’ve ever known from hadestown
> 
> This was originally supposed to be part of a much, much longer fic but that wasn’t working out so now I’m trying to rework the bits of it that I liked into shorter fics. If the first half of this seems a little disconnected (and if the style seems different, unfortunately), that’s why. It was intended to just frame the scene i was building up towards but then it took on a life of its own and I had to try at least a little. But I think I’m happy enough with how it turned out in the end.
> 
> Anyways, I hope you enjoy!!

In their third year, they kiss. 

If Kageyama were to ask anyone else, they'd say that it was a  _ long time coming.  _ But Kageyama isn’t anyone else- and Kageyama is beginning to think that things that may be obvious to other people are somewhat foreign to him- so he doesn’t see it coming at  _ all _ . Kageyama has other things to be worried about, contracts that he hardly understands to slog through and lifelong dreams to fulfill and best friends to agonize over because those best friends are up and moving halfway around the world. He’s been so busy lately that kissing is the  _ last _ thing on his mind, and he thinks that he’s quite justified in that, thank you. His knowledge of romance begins and ends with the movies Miwa likes to watch anyways, and in all of those movies the kissing never really happens like  _ this.  _

For one thing, he and Hinata are both kind of gross. It’s after practice and they’re out back by the vending machines, the good ones whose buttons don’t stick, and Hinata’s face has long gone red with exertion but it only looks brighter beneath the sweat-slick hair that’s curled up against his forehead. It’s much too hot outside to be comfortable, the cicadas buzzing a low monotone over the drawls of the heat and Kageyama’s own shirt sticking to his chest; his throat is dry and his breathing sharp and prickly, and the tag on his shorts is driving him crazy. Straight to hell and back. There’s the sharp tang of hard work still lingering in his mouth, bittersweet and heavy on his tongue, but while the sharp tang of hard work is many things it is decidedly not romantic.

Not by any standards that Kageyama’s seen anyways. He’s a learn-by-example kind of person, the type to observe and then imitate, and from what he’s seen if there’s to be kissing involved in  _ anything, _ then first there has to be that slow, slow buildup, then the swell of the music and the turn of the world on its head. And as nothing about the vending machines behind the gym that is particularly earth-shattering- other than the buttons that don’t stick, which is a self-contained miracle- he couldn’t for the life of him understand what it was about  _ this  _ place at  _ this _ time that appealed to Hinata. 

He guesses that the sunset could be romantic, if you turned your head just right. It’s one of the ones that turns the whole sky pink and orange, softer than the blood red skies they get sometimes but not half as mild as the cloudy sunsets, the one where the light turns everything a soft golden yellow. That sort of sunset is Kageyama’s favorite and this is  _ not  _ that sort of sunset, so maybe he’s biased but he still doesn’t think that this one is all that great. He guesses that the weight of Hinata pressed up against his side could be romantic; he guesses that the way that their hands brush, the way that Hinata turns his face into his Kageyama’s shoulder, the way that his feel pulse flutters against Kageyama’s, all that could be romantic. He guesses.

Or maybe he’s overthinking it, and nothing is romantic or everything is romantic or romance in general is a deeply personal thing that’s dependent on each individual person’s interest in it or lack thereof. He doesn’t know, and he doesn’t care. This is too difficult a thing to figure out when he doesn’t have the motivation, when it’s a mystery that’s of no consequence to him in the end.

All that’s really relevant is this: in their third year they kiss, and when they kiss it’s by the vending machines whose buttons don’t stick. Whether it’s romantic or not Kageyama doesn’t know and doesn’t care. 

So there they are. The sun is setting, and the cicadas are humming, and Hinata has just managed to wheedle enough change out of Kageyama to buy himself an energy drink. He’s acting sort of strange, but the drink he got is bright blue so now his mouth is bright blue, stained down to his bottom lip and spilling over to the little patch of skin right below it, and Kageyama finds that for some reason he is very preoccupied by that. 

He’s not quite sure what the feeling he gets when he looks at Hinata these days is called- it makes his stomach swoop and his insides wriggle and his legs go soft like jelly- but he did correctly classify it as a form of emotional vulnerability a while back, which means that he’s also been ignoring it for months and months on end now. His bizarre fixation on the way Hinata looks in the light, the way he has to stop himself from watching his shirt stretch across his chest, the way his eyes keep falling to the skin beneath his mouth; all of that seems like an extension of that same set of urges, and because Kageyama is nothing if not consistent, he chooses to ignore it.

Instead he lightly swats at Hinata’s shoulder, runs through all the appropriate hems and haws about Hinata having  _ stolen  _ his  _ money,  _ he’s not  _ made  _ of the stuff dumbass, but when it becomes clear that Hinata isn’t paying attention to him he stops. 

“What’s going on with you?” he asks. He tilts his head and moves closer, tries to look Hinata in the eye but Hinata just flinches back away from him, fluttering his fingers against the side of his drink. “Are you sick or something? You better not be trying to practice if you’re  _ sick,  _ you’re not gonna get any better if you don’t rest.”

He reaches out and jabs a finger into Hinata’s shoulder, feels the soft give of his flesh and looks for any sign of acknowledgement. Hinata’s biting at his lip and screwing up his face, the same look he gets when he’s trying to break bad news. Is there bad news? Is that why he’s been acting strange? If there’s bad news then he should say something. Kageyama can take it. They’re supposed to be friends, and from what he’s learned friends share things like its second nature, like they’d give an arm or a leg for each other if asked nicely.

But Kageyama doesn’t need an arm or a leg, just a reaction, so he pokes at Hinata again to see if he can get one. He can’t. The sun is dipping low in the sky and the machinery inside of the vending machine is humming, and Hinata’s hands are wet with condensation and he’s been acting strange enough lately that even Kageyama’s taken notice.

“What the fuck is wrong?” Kageyama says. Poke, poke, poke. Nothing. “Did something happen? Did-” 

“Kageyama,” Hinata says, talking over Kageyama and looking pensive. He screws the cap on his drink and sets it to the side and then leans as close as he can get. Immediately Kageyama’s mouth snaps shut and his breath does this embarrassing stutter-thing that he chooses to ignore, hitching in surprise because Hinata has a hand on his forearm and is staring straight into his eyes, biting at his lip. He looks nervous. Why is he nervous? He’s been acting very strange lately, like he’s going to do something drastic. Maybe he’s gotten himself into trouble and he needs help getting out. Maybe he’s done something that he shouldn’t have, and now he needs an arm and a leg or an extra set of hands or an extra set of eyes. 

“Kageyama, can I try something?”

Or maybe it’s something else entirely, because he’s too close and the angle too obvious for  _ try something  _ to mean anything other than what Kageyama thinks it does. And well. Well, okay. That explains a lot. It explains Hinata anyways, Hinata and his strange behavior which was apparently all shorthand for  _ we should kiss out back by the vending machines.  _ Okay. Okay. That’s good to know for future reference.

But he’s got something more pressing to attend to now. Something with big brown eyes and hair matted to his forehead and a worried, hesitant look set deep in his face as he waits for Kageyama to move. Kageyama is sort of blindsided- and again and again, everyone that he tells later will say that is was a  _ long time coming  _ but Kageyama is Kageyama, and Kageyama is  _ only  _ Kageyama and not everyone else- and even though this isn’t anything like one of Miwa’s movies, he thinks that he knows where it’s going. 

So he leans down and Hinata leans up, and there’s no swell of music but they both turn their heads (and the world tilts with them, one sharp wobble on its axis), and then they kiss. 

Kissing as a concept is not something that has ever appealed to Kageyama very much, so it’s never something that he’s sought out and it’s not something he’s sure he’s doing right. He doesn’t think that Hinata kisses all that much either, but he seems to know what he’s doing; he puts his hands in Kageyama’s hair so Kageyama puts his hands onto Hinata’s back, and neither one of them protests so from there it delves into a mess of warmth and softness and awkward angles that slowly melt into slightly  _ less  _ awkward angles as they figure things out. At some point his back ends up against the wall, and Hinata ends up right in front of him, and then they kiss some more. And some more. They kiss a  _ lot,  _ and Kageyama likes it a  _ lot,  _ and that confuses him a  _ lot,  _ because he isn’t quite sure what he thinks of Hinata even if he’s pretty sure that it lines up with his current course of action. Kageyama is not one to do things that he doesn’t want to do. 

So they keep kissing, and he keeps on enjoying it, and Hinata seems to be enjoying it too so Kageyama makes a decision then and there: this is something that he wants to do, so this is something that he will keep on doing. 

And so he does. 

“Wow,” Hinata says when they finally pull apart. His face is bright red, and he does not look Kageyama in the eye. “Wow. Wow, okay, wow. Thanks. Thank you, but I’ve got- I’ve gotta- wow, okay, I’ve gotta go. Somewhere.”

He reaches out and shakes Kageyama’s hand, and then he turns on his heel and walks away.

_ Oh _ , Kageyama thinks to himself as Hinata scrambles over to the bike rack. He watches him fumble, hair going red in the sunlight and uniform shirt rumpled at the back where Kageyama’s hands had settled because he didn’t know where else to put them. He unlocks his bike with an inhuman speed and swings a leg over, pedaling off so fast that there’s smoke. Soon enough he’s nothing but a tiny speck on the horizon, and then he sails up and over a hill and right down the other side, and then he’s gone and that’s that, and that’s done so Kageyama makes a stilted turn- his legs feel all stiff and shaky, his arms like someone else’s arms that have been shoved into his own sockets, how  _ strange  _ how  _ strange _ \- and he uses the fingers from his someone-else arm to grapple what remains of his change from his pocket and then jam it into the vending machine. 

He presses at the buttons.  _ Whir  _ go the coils and  _ thump  _ goes the milk box, and right now Kageyama is not all there, so instinct takes over and guides his arms through his usual motions, through the rip and puncture of the straw and the lean back up against the wall. It’s gritty. Cold and rough and patchwork, made of brick-red bricks and yellow-red bricks and white-streaked bricks.

Someone once told Kageyama that he was like a brick wall.  _ Dense  _ is what they’d meant, and  _ dense  _ is what he’d heard, but he hadn’t taken it to heart because people say all sorts of mean things to him, and at some point he’d found that they couldn’t hurt him anymore and just carried on with his life. But his back is pressed flat against a brick wall right now- and earlier, Hinata had pressed his back flat against a brick wall and  _ kissed _ him- and the brick wall is rough, and the brick wall is scratching at the back of his arms, and for the first time ever he thinks that he  _ really  _ understands what they meant. Hinata looks at him often, and Kageyama had brushed it off as coincidence (dense) and Hinata walks him home every day, holding onto the handlebars of his bike but still situating himself close enough for their arms to brush (dense), and once he told Kageyama that he  _ really likes him, you know,  _ and Kageyama has asked what he was going on about  _ now _ . Dense. He’s  _ dense. _

Well that’s fine. Even if he never understood it before, not in the intimate, firsthand way that he does now, Kageyama knew enough. This is not a revelation- this is a logical extension, and he may not be the smartest but he can understand those. Hinata looks at him, Hinata touches him, Hinata likes him and Hinata kisses him. And when Kageyama thinks about it, really  _ thinks  _ about it like he tries not to think about things, he can see that he does all of those things too; he looks, he touches, he likes, he kisses.

_ Okay,  _ Kageyama thinks. He takes a sip of his milk and thinks of Hinata’s hands in his hair, the warmth of his arms pressing into Kageyama’s shoulders, the crick in his neck that he got from bending down and wants to be angry about but can’t.  _ Okay. Okay. _

Okay. 

So it’s not the most romantic thing, in the end. Or maybe it is and his perspective’s just skewed because his world went and turned itself on its head. Either way it feels right and it feels natural, so Kageyama isn’t going to agonize; he’s going to stand with his back straight up against this brick wall and he’s going to finish his drink, and he's going to wait for the feeling to come back into his limbs and then he’s going to go home. 

He's not going to dwell on the details. The devil’s in the details, and the proof is in the pudding, and when he tells everyone else about this later they’re going to tell him that this kiss was a  _ long time coming.  _ While he’s on the subject, talking to some people is like talking to a brick wall, and romance might be dead and it might be alive- romance, Kageyama is beginning to think, is as slippery and finicky as a cat- and most of the time the sky is blue, but sometimes it’s red and sometimes it’s yellow and right now it’s pink and orange. 

These are facts of life. Among them: in their third year, they kiss. 

Among them: Kageyama likes Hinata. If he’s putting words to the feelings that he's been trying to crush down beneath his heel, then that’s what he’d say. If he’s being honest with himself, then that’s what he knows. If, if, if. He’s growing tired of constantly dodging his feelings, he thinks, because from his new perspective the world has much more to offer and he’d like to see some of it if he's able. If, if, if.

Among them: Kageyama likes Hinata, and that’s alright. It’s not the devastating realization that he thought it would be, and the earth isn’t splitting in two and the sky’s not falling, so he’s got some time to figure things out anyways. Not too long, though; he likes Hinata a  _ lot,  _ if he’s admitting things, and now he knows that he likes kissing Hinata a  _ lot,  _ and Kageyama’s not really one to draw things out for longer than he needs to once he knows what’s going on. He may be dense, but he’s also stubborn. And now he’s got a basis, and he’s got a goal, and against all odds Kageyama’s even got a little bit of hope.

And that may not be romantic- or it may be, he still doesn’t know and he’s not sure he ever will- but it’s alright. It’s alright, and he’s alright, and Hinata’s alright because they’re in their third year and now they’ve kissed, and Kageyama’s not sure where this is going to go from here but he’s sure that they’re going to figure it out.

So for now, he’s alright.

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Please consider leaving a comment if you enjoyed!! I love hearing from you guys!!


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